Publications

Hydrogen aircraft have the potential to achieve greater climate impact reductions at a lower cost than aircraft powered by biofuels or other drop-in sustainable aviation fuels. But even as a liquid, hydrogen requires four times more volume than kerosene to store the same energy. Companies and researchers have suggested that the blended wing body configuration is well-suited to hydrogen because it can efficiently store the large fuel tanks. However, nobody has quantified this claim, at least publicly. We address this gap by comparing optimized kerosene and hydrogen versions of blended wing body and tube and wing aircraft. We find that the blended wing body configuration has only a small advantage for onboard hydrogen storage compared to a conventional tube and wing aircraft. Our models predict that with ambitious hydrogen tank technology assumptions, a hydrogen blended wing body uses 3.1% more energy than a kerosene blended wing body, while the energy increase for a tube and wing is 5.1%. An advantage of the blended wing body is that the energy consumption increase when adapting from kerosene to hydrogen fuel appears to be far less sensitive than the tube and wing’s to empty weight and drag changes. Because we only compare hydrogen and kerosene usage within the same configuration, a hydrogen blended wing body may still consume substantially less energy than a hydrogen tube and wing. However, these results do call into question the assumed tank storage benefit of a hydrogen-powered blended wing body aircraft.